Charlottesville Breaking News

Albemarle police Sergeant Sean Hackney has been on the other side of traffic fatalities: his own brother died in a DUI crash. "I always think of that every time I go up Route 20 near Key West," he says.

Lisa Provence

David Shipp wanted to let a friend hear the new speakers in his BMW. The car went off the road and flipped several times. He was 21 years old.

COURTESY DEBBIE SHIPP

Albemarle police spokesman Darrell Byers points to the map where pushpins mark the 19 fatalities on county roads so far this year.

lisa provence

Police can calculate how fast a vehicle was going from these distinctive tracks, called yaw marks.

PHOTO COURTESY ALBEMARLE POLICE

Jessica Marie Lewis has been charged with involuntary manslaughter for the deaths of her daughter and ex-husband.

Albemarle Police

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"Let me grab my phone– I'm expecting a victim's family to
call."

That's Sergeant Sean Hackney on November 17, the morning after
the fifth person has died in less than a week on an Albemarle
County road. He's operating on an hour-and-a-half of sleep, and all
the officers in Albemarle police's traffic unit are working a
fatality.

At the Albemarle police station on 5th Street, the bland
cubicles stand in sharp contrast to the grisly scenes officers
encounter out on the street. A map of the county is dotted with
pushpins– 19 of them, representing all the locations where people
have had fatal encounters with vehicles this year.

There are motorcycle accidents– three of them. There's the
tragedy of backing up and realizing too late that a child is behind
the car. There are the seemingly inexplicable single-car accidents.
Sergeant Hackney has seen them all.

Scottsville Road has had two deaths. Earlier this year, Black
Cat Road had two in a row.

"We do see geographical trends," says a clearly frustrated
Hackney. "Right now, it's all over the county south of 64."

But why the recent spate of deaths, pushing Albemarle to 19 so
far this year, the highest death toll since 2003's record 24
fatalities?

'What we see over and over again are speed, seatbelts, and
alcohol," says Hackney. "We see at least one of those in most
accidents."

The vast majority have all three factors, and Hackney points out
that impaired dri...

With its seats filled and with huddled masses of humanity lining
the aisles and anterooms, City Council Chambers had never in recent
memory appeared so crowded. But in the end, the literally dozens of
pro-Occupy Charlottesville speakers didn't get exactly what they
wanted, which was unlimited permission to remain ensconced in Lee
Park after their current permit expires on Thanksgiving Day.

Occupy campers and their supporters– one as young as twelve
years old– thronged Charlottesville's governing body for four hours
during Council's November 21 meeting. When it was over, the mayor
said he had no plans to oust the protestors– who have peacefully
inveighed against American economic disparity. But Mayor Dave
Norris also said he wanted them to relocate, as some North
Downtowners have grown tired of the round-the-clock spectacle of
porta-potties and about 50 tents in the one-acre park.

However, at least one City Councilor, Kristin Szakos, expressed
firm solidarity, even offering an impassioned First Amendment
defense of the effort which began in October with a few placards
and which now includes scores of people and a nightly campfire.

"For me," said Szakos, "the occupation is speech. Free speech
doesn't end af 11 o'clock, and it doesn't end after
Thanksgiving."

That's the kind of support that kept the faithful– most wearing
some bit of red fabric as a sign of solidarity– under Council's
fluorescent lights when they might...

George Grady ('54 Burley High) greets two members of the Charlottesville 12, Raymond Dixon and John Martin.

hawes spencer

The "Charlottesville 12," the African-American boys and girls– now men and women– who boldly strolled into Venable Elementary School and Lane High School 52 years ago to break down the walls of segregation, finally got to see their struggle commemorated with a pair of permanent historic markers. The signs were dedicated Friday, November 18 on the grounds of the two schools, one of which is now the Albemarle County Office Building.

"That's the most amazing thing," said John Martin, in a post-ceremony interview as he gestured toward the steel marker on the grounds of what had been Lane High School. "I would have never dreamed it."

Martin, who now lives in Richmond, told the story of what it was like to be a 14-year-old on the front lines of integration in a 2004 Hook cover story.

The commemorations include another chance to meet the Charlottesville 12, an 11am Saturday, November 19 event in the Venable auditorium.

UVA officials cut the ribbon Friday morning on a $65 million
building that can provide real-time reports on its own utility
usage while educating the next wave of brainiacs. The November 18
event celebrated Rice Hall, a center for information technology
engineering and a place that welcomes the future with several nods
to the past.

The base of the structure, for instance, recalls that icon of
postbellum urbanity, H.H. Richardson,
with a sloped base that the lead architect calls a "batter."
Executed in a dark-hued brick (as Richardson often did), the base
leads up to areas of lighter brick, bands of contrasting stone and
brick; and it's all capped with a deeply projecting cornice.

Unlike the cornices of Richardson's day, however, this one is
streamlined. And in another bold break with the past, fully 40
percent of the structure's surface area is glass. At the entrance,
which faces west-northwest, the glass is sheathed with a layer of
steel for which even the designer doesn't seem to have a name.

"Modern portico screen thing would be good," says lead architect
Roxanne Sherbeck, indulging a reporter's stab at a moniker.
Discussing the unique steel curtain that shields the entrance and
the westerly windows from the harshest sun, she says the design was
inspired by Thomas Jefferson's colonnades, such as those on his
famous Lawn– albeit in a vertical form.

At a typical level of a million dollars each, Craig recruited investors-- each of whom lost his million.

hawes spencer

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In its first two years in the hands of speculators, doomed
housing development Biscuit Run rang up over $7 million in
expenses, including nearly a quarter million dollars paid to lead
investor Hunter Craig. That's according to a court filing in the
lawsuit in which Craig and company, already partially bailed out by
taxpayers, are suing for nearly $20 million in additional public
funds.

According to the filing at the Albemarle County Courthouse, the
former owners concede they paid $240,000 to Craig Management LLC to
oversee the property's rezoning in 2007. That's more than the
group, organized just two years earlier, paid its environmental
engineers, its traffic consultants, or to the civil engineers who
designed the master plan for an intended 3,100-unit development on
the nearly 1,200 acres southwest of Charlottesville.

Most expense categories, however, fall far short of what the
group spent in its first two years on legal fees– over $700,000–
and on the biggest expense of all: millions in interest on borrowed
money that pushed their company, Forest Lodge LLC, to the brink of
insolvency and so traumatized one of its lenders that it issued a
special report to shareholders about the delinquent loan.

Much of the bleeding came to a halt on December 30, 2009, when
Biscuit Run was sold to the Virginia Department of Conservation and
Recreation as a state park, a deal heralded by the outgoing
governor, Tim Kaine, as a "bargain." However, investiga...